Manimal Planet
Anti-Mermaid Legislation Rises from the Deep
SOURCE: Wikipedia Commons
In 2006, President Bush called for a ban on the creation of animal-human hybrids. This month, Sen. Sam Brownback returned with a bill to stop the monsters.
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Some years ago Thomas Frank asked, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” But the oddity of an economically distressed state that repeatedly votes against its own interest is nothing compared to the bizarre preoccupation of its senior senator.
Sam Brownback (R) wants to make sure that the United States government prevents the creation of human-animal monstrosities that could destroy humankind.
For years Sen. Brownback has been worried about mixing human and animal tissues for scientific purposes. In 2005 he introduced the Human-Animal Chimera Prohibition Act, which would have imposed civil and criminal penalties for making certain kinds of laboratory animals. The unintended consequences of this bill would have included severely hampering medical research on serious human diseases like Alzheimer’s that seem to have a genetic component.
Although barely noticed at the time, Brownback’s concerns got enough attention in the Bush White House to earn a reference in the 2006 state of the union address, in which the president called for banning human-animal hybrids. The remark excited little public comment, perhaps because it was so odd, and it certainly didn’t earn President Bush any more points with a scientific community that already held him in low esteem.
At the time I suggested that the White House speechwriters didn’t seem to know the difference between a hybrid and a chimera. All hybrids are chimeras because they involve mixtures from two sources, but hybrids are a special kind of chimera in which the genes themselves are mixed. A familiar example of a hybrid is a mule, a sterile animal that is produced by mating a horse with a donkey. Chimeras range from people with heart valves from pigs to people who resulted from fused embryos to once-pregnant women who carry some fetal cells with them the rest of their lives to the valuable lab animals I mentioned.
Apparently Senator Brownback has learned the difference between chimeras and hybrids. His new bill specifically “does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to treat patients.” So the senator wants to ensure that the genetic makeup of human beings is not altered by some sort of animal combination, which would be “a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”
Conceding the dignity problem for the sake of argument, it’s hard to understand how a race of mermaids would be an injustice, certainly not to the mermaids themselves.
As a presidential primary candidate Sen. Brownback expressed his doubts about evolution. One wonders how he would square that position with his worry about the potential development of the human germline. Anxious about blurring species boundaries, the senator also likes to tout his background in agriculture that has given him expertise in genetic engineering of crops and livestock. It’s probably time for him to take a refresher course in animal husbandry, since speciation remains a poorly understood process. Genetics turns out to be only one component, and there are various ways to define a species.
Brownback has announced that he is leaving the senate to run for governor of Kansas. One might have expected that Kansas would, in a Brownback administration, be the first state to outlaw human-animal hybrids. But the (non-hybridized) Sunflower State is not the pioneer in preventing a pollution that could ultimately produce centaurs or the planet of the apes. Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal already signed a bill into law that would protect the Bayou State from such a fate, seemingly inspired by Sen. Brownback’s scary vision. Apparently bi-partisanship does not count as a suspect hybrid, since Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu has signed onto the Brownback bill.
Some years ago the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the difference between modern and pre-modern states is that in the former sovereignty is claimed over life rather than death. Foucault would have delighted in this example of the exercise of sovereign authority over human bodies, and not just current ones, but those in the distant future as well. But do the conservative extremists who support this kind of nonsense appreciate that using state power to keep the human race pure serves the same eugenic purpose that they commonly attribute to the left?
The proposed protections are incomplete. They only cover human-animal monstrosities made within our borders. I propose the “Human-Animal Hybrid Immigration Prohibition Act of 2009.”
Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.
Comments on this article
Dr. Moreno neglects to mention that the National Academy of Sciences’ report Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research (2005) of which he was the co-chair specifically opposed the creation of certain kinds of human-animal chimeras. The revelant section from pages 124-125 is reproduced below. Moreover, several countries, including our neighbor to the North, Canada have approved legislation virtually identical to Brownback’s bill.
“(c) Research that should not be permitted at this time:
1. Research involving in vitro culture of any intact human embryo, regardless of derivation method, for longer than 14 days or until formation of the primitive streak begins, whichever occurs first.
2. Research in which hES cells are introduced into nonhuman primate blastocysts or in which any ES cells are introduced into human blastocysts.
In addition:
3. No animal into which hES cells have been introduced at any stage of development should be allowed to breed.”
July 29th, 2009 at 5:22 pmI’m just an old woman, who’s father taught her that what made Americans different, was that they were intelligent individuals who join together for the benefit and advancement of the people and their society. To me, we seem to have become a people who fear anything that takes effort to learn and understand. We appear to prefer superstition over discovery. It does seem to me that science and discovery can’t move forward when blocked by fear and superstition. Perhaps it is just luck that Mr. Brownback was not present, as the early lifeforms of our world tried something novel, such as trying out the lands of Earth, instead of continuing to just swim around and around until the Earth’s final days. Hum; if that had happened, would there be a Mr. Brownback, ever?
July 29th, 2009 at 6:00 pmNice post, Sharon.
It seems to me that ethical scientists would be appalled at what Brownback’s bill would outlaw. It also seems to me that ethical scientists should/can/would be the ones to police what a handful of rogue scientists might try to do.
We really don’t need politicians dabbling in science. Why not just pass a bill that it is illegal to make a cent off of chimera research. That will be the end of that, and if it proves necessary to amend or repeal such a law later, that can be done.
As politicians get more greedy and more ignorant and uncaring (kind of like the population in general) we need to stop legislating their creationist beliefs.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:11 pmClearly some concerned Christian parent caught their kid watching “Fullmetal Alchemist” on Cartoon Network and sent a frantic message to Sen. Brownback that the evil plot of the homunculi and their chimeras must be stopped!
My Grandmother had Parkinsons and she used to think people in soap operas were talking about her behind her back. Don’t think the scenario I painted above is at all far-fetched.
I mean, really. Anyone who wastes so much as an instant of the time of the highest legislative body in the US with this rubbish should be instantly sacked.
Same for anyone who has real doubts about the theory of evolution, since we have been forcibly evolving domesticated animals to our needs for centuries. Nor does a former governor who thinks the world is 6k years old get to be President.
I really think it’s time for the thinking people of this nation to stop politely tolerating imbeciles. Religion, fine, have your religion. But don’t pretend it teaches you things about the non-spiritual that eclipses scientific inquiry. Such approaches leads to…well, for instance administrations that censor and edit scientific findings to meet their dispensationalist agendas.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:12 ama little over a hundred thousand people waiting for organ transplants….
that is only about 0.0000150 % of the world’s population… but the risk of releasing -accidentally, a porcine endogenous retrovirus, which threatens the health of the 6.5 BILLION people on earth…through dangerous genetic blended mutants of animal/ human hybrids, now that makes sense.
How could this happen? PERV arises from hybrid cells.
I tend to agree with the wisdom of Sam Brownback-his expertise in genetic engineering of crops and livestock certainly brings awareness of the ethical and the potentially dangerous outcomes of bringing human and other animals’ genetic material together at this time in history, as we do not know the implications.
What is wrong with reviewing the risks of disease transmission and proposing preventative measures
before
proceeding?
Then who is to suffer when after the xenotransplantation products prove to be more dangerous than the initial disease?
In such a hurry to skip over common sense?
There are many other ethical questions which are not considered in this article.
September 14th, 2009 at 4:15 pm